Only in Naples (29 page)

I
n the early years of Anthony's and Raffaella junior's lives, my priorities as a mother were to raise children who were:

Salvatore's priorities as a father were to raise children who were:

If Salva was fixated over these priorities for Anthony, the birth of a defenseless baby girl took his fixations to the extreme.

During the first summer of little Raffaella's life, Salva's fathering was dependent on two all-important remote controls, each kept in a separate pocket of his velour dressing gown. The television remote was used every five minutes to check on the results of the Napoli soccer team. The other remote regulated our air-conditioning units, or as Italians call them, our “splits.”

We have remote-controlled wall units in all rooms of our apartment, and they are usually (even in the worst heat of the summer) turned off. This is not because air-conditioning per se is hazardous to your health (although it is! Don't you know that?) but because the splits create drafts that cause, among other things, the common cold, neck cricks, and bronchitis. In the worst-case scenario (among the very young and very old), they can provoke pneumonia and paralysis. “Drafts” can be translated as
correnti,
a word Italians pronounce with a menacing rolled
r
.

Hence the importance of my husband's vigilant control of the splits. Who is responsible for regulating the air-conditioning at my house in Washington? I have been asked by my in-laws. Who has the holster for the sacred remote? My mother, who is
freddolosa
(always cold) or my father, who is
caloroso
(would downhill ski in his Speedos)? No one? With central air, we just set the temperature and forget about it. It astonishes them that day and night, morning and afternoon, there's
no regulating.

When Raffaella junior was tiny, I would strap her into her high chair far away from her roaming, raging brother. No matter the room, Sal Quick-at-the-Draw would find her. He would find his daughter—buckled in, immobile, defenseless—regulate the vents with his remote, and exit. It would happen in a nanosecond. We would not hear the sound of footsteps, nor would we get a glimpse of him in his loungewear. Sal's presence was heralded by the
beep-beep-beep
of the remote control.
Beep-beep-beep,
another child rescued from a
corrente,
and he'd be gone.

Recent sightings of Quick Draw Sal have revealed that, even in summer, he dresses in layers. The Italian expression is
a cipolla,
like an onion. His loungewear begins with a white short-sleeved undershirt. Then come the pajamas—long-sleeved gray pajamas printed with little white curly-tailed cats interspersed with fluffy clouds. The legs of the pajamas are tucked into his very long navy-blue knee socks, so that no chilly air will come up his pajama legs. The undershirt and pajama top are tucked into the pants tightly so that, once again, no air will make its way to his belly. As a general rule, air is not to touch exposed flesh unless one is at the beach in Sardinia and it is 101 degrees. Salvatore's dressing gown, worn over his pajamas, is soft velour and is tied (tightly) around the waist.

Bedroom slippers are often mismatched in our household. In Italy, and in Naples in particular, bare feet are not to touch floors, even in the summer. When I wake up in the Avallones' apartment, I find slippers already on my feet before I put them down on the parquet. Some concerned kinswoman does not want me catching a cold, and everyone knows that I, as an American, have been known to walk around the apartment barefoot and sometimes even with wet hair. Salvatore, careful not to touch the floor, dons the slippers closest to the bed when he wakes up in the morning. There have been times when one of those slippers is pink, has feathers, and is mine.

In Naples, most sicknesses can be directly traced to one of three culprits: the aforementioned drafts or
correnti;
a moment when a person has
preso freddo,
gotten a chill; or, worst of all,
preso umido,
has taken humidity into their bones. For me, much of the difficulty of raising small children in this country comes down to the fact that I, as an American, do not recognize these dangers. I take my children out when it's fifty degrees and not raining. I know enough to keep them bundled in hats, scarves, and gloves, with no inch of bare skin showing. But if it's humid, or if all of a sudden it starts to get windy, I do not grab them and sprint to the nearest shelter.

Once, when Anthony got a cold, I overheard some Neapolitan family members talking about how I had taken him out on Wednesday. Yes, Wednesday! The day of that humidity! They tried their best to understand. “Maybe in Washington, where she grew up, the climate is so dry that they don't know what humidity is!”

Since the possibility of humidity and the risk of getting a chill loom large during winter, you can only imagine the stress of an outing with children when it rains. If it rains, children should stay at home, and adults should go out only if absolutely necessary.

If anyone has any negative preconceptions about Italians and their organizational abilities, they should watch a family with small children getting out of their car when it's raining—a family that has made the decision to venture out in the
tempesta.
In our family, Salva briefs me on how the tag team is to proceed with the umbrellas as we're about to arrive at our destination. “I will drive up to the front door. You should have the small umbrella in your pocket. I will open the big umbrella and accompany you with Lella in your arms into the building. Leave her inside and give me the small umbrella. I'll give you the big umbrella. Go get Anthony from the car and I'll go and park the car with the small umbrella.”

The whole relay proceeds without a glitch. It is fast, it is efficient but also highly stressful. The fear that the kids might get wet is so real and so intense that I forget that the drops that are falling from the sky are only water.

I've come to realize that the number of sweaters and ski jackets that my husband puts on members of his family is in direct proportion to the love that he feels for us. If I manage to leave the apartment in winter without his accosting me, pinning me down, and zipping up my ski jacket, it means that he is angry with me. Let her go out with no jacket in March. To hell with her! Let her dig her own grave.

When it comes to the children, the smaller and more vulnerable they are, the more sweaters they get. As babies, Anthony and Raffaella were often hot and sweaty and fussy. It drove me crazy to see Salva pile on the layers, so, as soon as he was out of sight, I would strip them down. This was complicated, though, because they were small and uncooperative and confused by the continual costume changes. In a moment of particular tension on this front, my sister (an accomplished seamstress and costumer) told me that she thought our marriage could be saved and the harmony in our family restored if she just got rid of our zippers and buttons and Velcroed us all.

The reason I tend to get angry and a little bitter is that it's hard enough to have kids who are sick, without being accused of provoking it. My rational brain tells me that colds are viruses, and they get passed from person to person. I don't mention that to people in Naples, though. One way to find yourself friendless and ignored in Italy is to start a sentence with “Studies show” or “Scientists have found.”

So I've decided to go with the flow, avoid
umidità
and
correnti,
and bring along my CVS disinfectant so that all the bases are covered.

I
n ancient times, rich Romans would go to the seaside near Naples for the summer. It made sense. It still does. Without the ocean, Rome gets hotter than Naples in the summertime, and when you can't turn on the air-conditioning splits, and you're breast-feeding, and you're not allowed to sweat…the only option is to pack the kids up like
signore
have been doing for thousands of years and go to the beach. Or, if you happen to be American, to a swimming pool.

Salva finds my preference for swimming pools (no fiery rocks, or sand in crevices, or seaweed—the reasons are endless) immoral. Preferring a swimming pool to the ocean is akin to preferring frozen pizza to a fresh one right out of the oven. But I was hot and sleep-deprived and nursing and my husband knew what was good for him.

He called his friend from high school, Enrico, and told him we were coming with the kids for lunch and a swim.

Enrico had grown up in a
basso
in the dense center of Naples. The
bassi
are the street-level apartments that house extended families in the Spanish Quarter. “What adorable little restaurants!” I gushed to Salvatore the day he stripped me of jewelry, wallet, watch, and cellphone and took me on a tour of the Quartieri
.
I saw little tables propped up in alleyways, just outside of kitchens with lace curtains. The smell of peppers frying made me drool. “Do you think they're open?”

“What restaurants? Those are people's homes, and if you stand there salivating any longer they'll invite you to lunch.”

Motorbikes whizzed by, missing us by millimeters. Salva, despite the fact that this was not his hood, could tell me which young guys on the bikes were thieves and which were undercover plainclothes cops. (“You can tell, that's all,” he explained when I wondered how he could distinguish them.) Neither category wore the obligatory helmet.

“Enrico abitava qui,”
he told me, pointing to an alley strung with laundry. He had a friend who lived here? I was surprised. “Who
used
to live here,” he clarified.

Enrico had grown up heading soccer balls against the graffitied stone walls of his
basso,
but now lived in Bacoli, a suburb full of single-family villas. It's where many stars of the Naples soccer team (most are South American or eastern European) have chosen to live. In Bacoli there is space, there are pools. Gone is the stench of garbage and the constant buzz of motor-bikes. Even robberies are high-class affairs: they are not
scippi
(pickpocketing and purse snatching) like in the Spanish Quarter, but full-fledged team efforts with drills and other power tools, performed by “expert” thieves. (A psychologist friend in Naples told me that one of her patients proudly noted that her husband was a
mariuolo di case,
a house thief, rather than a simple pickpocket. There is a major difference in terms of job profile.)

Enrico and his family made their money in clothing stores. They are
commercianti,
store owners, a term that is used by the Neapolitan bourgeoisie with not a little prejudice. Store owners who have been economically successful are considered nouveaux riches, but the term's Neapolitan translation,
cafoni arrichiti,
doesn't need to be uttered—it's enough to say
commerciante.
The Cardones have worked hard and moved up in the world. They have sacrificed, skipped afternoon naps, brought lunches from home to their stores (which don't even close! Some of the first stores in Naples not to close even for lunch!).

We arrived at the Cardones' villa in Bacoli just before noon on a scorching Saturday in July. The cameras on their high-tech alarm system (“Best ten thousand euros I ever spent,” Enrico told us, and Salva later explained that a telltale sign of
commercianti
is that they speak in numbers, never afraid to tell you exactly how much something cost) blinked blue as the electric gate buzzed open. It was a slow curtain opening for Enrico's mother, who greeted us center stage in a tiny sequined bikini holding a one-year-old grandchild on her hip.

“Salvató! Viene ccà!”
she called in a voice that was not of the gravelly grandma variety but a high, hysterical trumpet. Her voice told me she didn't smoke; her body told me she had other vices. She held the arm that wasn't supporting the baby out to hug Salva, and he disappeared for a moment into her 250-pound, dark-skinned embrace. She wore Ray Charles sunglasses and sported a platinum-blond bob. The sequins were under severe garment duress.

“This is Ketrin,” Salvatore told her. When she didn't move her head but just reached her hand out to pinch my chin, looking for me with her bloated fingers, I realized that if she was not totally blind she was close to it.
“Che nome è? Kay-tree?”
What kind of name is that? “Salvató, where did you go to pick this chick up?” They both laughed and I joined in. Kay-tree! Go figure!

She led us to the pool where her daughter-in-law Giada sat on a deck chair reading the riot act to her three-year-old child. Giada and Enrico had three daughters under the age of six. The girls, dressed in Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, and Lacoste, were all blond and scowling. (“See that little horse, American flag, and crocodile? Five hundred euros a month,” Enrico told us later. “That's Giada's clothing allowance for the girls.”)

Giada had told her daughters that they could not go in the swimming pool today. There was a little wind; Ludovica had had a cough last Tuesday. This is never going to work, I thought. They're being asked to spend all afternoon moving between their grandmother's hip, deck chairs, and a lunch table? Listening to grown-ups talk and gazing at the crystal-blue water? When it's ninety-six degrees?

Little Raffaella was already splashing her feet in the water and Anthony was doing cannonballs. I was not going to veto that. It was ninety-six degrees.

Enrico's oldest daughter started to whine, and Giada shouted, “No is
no
!”

Before I knew what was happening, Giada had smacked her daughter across the face with speed and efficiency. Were my children and I responsible for child abuse? Giada saw my concern. “What, you never hit your kids?” The exact words that she used in Neapolitan dialect were:
“Nu' ll'abbuffe maie 'e mazzate?”
Whop them upside the head, I think would be the most accurate translation.

In Naples, it's still common in schools for teachers to strike kids with rulers, or spank them. When I taught English to a group of preschoolers, the director of the school told me on the first day that if things got out of hand I shouldn't hesitate to hit them. Not hard, of course. Just to get them to listen to you.

But I had never seen skill like this woman's: bam bam! Front of the hand! Back of the hand! Before I knew it the girl was sitting immobile next to her mother and Giada was talking to her mother-in-law about the state of the stuffed peppers.

Giada doesn't call her mother-in-law Mrs. Cardone or Angelica. She uses the term that Neapolitan daughters-in-law are meant to use:
Mammà.
With the accent on the final
a,
it is down-home dialect for the Italian
mamma
(accent on the first
a
) and thus even more intimate. If
Mamma
is Mom,
Mammà
is Mommy.

Since Enrico and Giada live with his extended family, the two women spend all their time together. While their husbands man the stores, Giada and Mammà plan, buy the ingredients for, and cook the three meals that are nothing short of feasts at the Cardone household. (Cleaning is done by a uniformed, thin Brazilian maid. To see the women of the house all overweight and the help skinny seems a throwback to the last century.) Breakfast consists of homemade cakes and
crostate,
or fruit pies, and lunch and dinner include a
primo,
or pasta course, a
secondo
that is meat or fish, and at least two labor-intensive vegetables. Because the gentlemen do not come all the way back to the villa for lunch, the team of wives package up their husbands' lunches for them to take to work.

In Naples, packaging food is an art form. Newspapers, rubber bands, Styrofoam, freezer bags, soft rags, string, and twine are used. Temperature and distance to be traveled are taken into consideration, and obstacles such as customs regulations in a foreign country or the length of a transatlantic flight are seen as exciting challenges. A friend who is an Alitalia flight attendant told me that Neapolitans can always be recognized by the packages of food that they hold close on board a plane. They often refuse to put them in the overhead compartments—after all, who knows what the exact temperature is up there?

The last time I flew back to Washington, D.C., at Christmas, Zia Pia called me a few days before the flight. “We've figured out a way!” she told me. A way to do what? “To get the octopus to your father!” Aunt Pia knew that my father loves
insalata di polipo
and damned if she wasn't going to get it to him. In my already packed suitcase. Her plan involved nestling the slimy creature in the underwear compartment of my pull-along. Bubble wrap and rags would do the trick. What if it starts to drip? I asked her.

“Eehhh
[on the exhale]
…che vuoi fa'?”
she answered. What can you do? These are just the risks one has to take.

Because the Cardone gentlemen's fried eggplant, roast veal, and baked pasta casseroles only have to travel across town, Giada and her
mammà
's packaging job is simple. All they need is some old
Mattino
newspapers, Tupperware, and heavy-duty rubber bands.

Mr. Cardone appeared from inside the house wearing a Speedo. He was tall and thin, with lots of white hair and skin the color of dark clay. He introduced himself, sat down, and lit up a cigarette.

“
Giada,
vedi nu poco i peperoni a Mammà
.” Angelica too had lowered herself onto one of the deck chairs and wanted Giada to check the stuffed peppers in the oven, which smelled like the Quartieri Spagnoli, where the family had its origins. Her sentences, whether she was commanding, cuddling, or cursing, always ended by underlining the relationship she had with her listener. Her words brought her family members back to her broad brown bosom. To her daughter-in-law, Can you check the peppers for Mammà? To her niece, Oh, how beautiful you are to your aunt! To her granddaughter, Baby girl, wipe your nose for Nonna.